North Korean foreign minister Ri Yong Ho warned Saturday that it is “inevitable” that his country will launch a missile toward the mainland United States in revenge for the insults President Trump has directed at leader Kim Jong Un.

“None other than Trump himself is on a suicide mission,” Ri said. –Los Angeles Times

US Air Force B-1B Lancer bombers escorted by fighter jets flew in international airspace over waters east of North Korea on Saturday (Sept 23), in a show of force the Pentagon said demonstrated the range of military options available to President Donald Trump. –Reuters

Comment: The US flights are not only a message to Pyongyang, they are a message to China that a war could break out and the US would use overwhelming firepower. Only that prospect, and the related prospect of Japan and South Korea going nuclear themselves, has moved China to act.

My hunch is that Beijing is trying to figure out what kinds of pressure they can use to change North Korean policy or, alternatively, if they want to risk backing a coup.

◆From the serious (North Korea) to the ridiculous (Trump versus the NFL, NBA): What happened? And what makes it important?

The tweets and text below explain what happened.

It’s important because it exemplifies America’s techtonic cultural and political divide, particularly over race and patriotism.

And it highlights what Trump’s supporters like about him (straight talk, forthright defense of America) and what his opponents loathe (vile language that worsens an inflamed situation).

On Twitter and at his big rally in Huntsville, AL, Pres. Trump attacked NFL players who “took a knee,” rather than stand for the National Anthem. That behavior has spread among NFL teams this season.

A flurry of counter-attacks came from the NFL, led by Commissioner Roger Goodell. This kerfuffle spread to the NBA when LeBron James called the president “a bum” and Golden State Warriors’ Stephen Curry decided not to visit the White House.

The President took a traditional position in an untraditional way. It is hardly surprising that a President supports American patriotism and its prominent symbols.

It is beneath the dignity of the office to call the players “sons of bitches.”

The players have free-speech rights.

Pros don’t have to stand for the national anthem unless their contracts say otherwise.

College and high-school players are in a more complicated situation. The coaches and school administrators can set rules of behavior.

Fans have rights, too, and can boo the players, refuse to buy products they advertise, refuse to go to games, and so on.

Three points have been missing in this discussion, which seems to be a big deal on cable TV.

Professional athletics is entertainment. The athletes are entertainers, same as Hollywood actors, Nashville singers, or sports networks like ESPN. Taking controversial political stances will narrow their audience appeal, as they are finding out. NFL owners know that. They must be beside themselves.

The country’s racial and political divide was bound to spread beyond the normal boundaries of politics. Black athletes were drawn in to this controversy, just as they were drawn into the Black Power controversies of the 1960s.

Now, the activists on all sides will mobilize and get involved. This is Al Sharpton territory.

This could well be brilliant politics for Trump

It plays perfectly to his base and to the majority of Americans who respect the flag and other patriotic symbols. Trump knows that in his gut and he moved to exploit it. (His own crude language may undercut some of that support.)

The NFL fan base–and Trump voters–hate the players’ disrespect for the flag and national anthem.

With NFL attendance and viewership down this year (for whatever reasons), Trump can take credit for leading a parade that was already marching down the street.

The only thing that could be better for Trump would be for leading Democrats to support the kneeling athletes. That would be a gift to Trump, but the Democratic base may force prospective presidential candidates to take that position, just as it is forcing them into support for single-payer health care.

◆ Pres. Trump’s speech to the UN was blunt and aimed squarely at North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela

It combined two main elements:

A traditional Republican assertion of US military strength and global engagements

Trump’s own nationalist, anti-globalist agenda, praising “strong sovereign nations” (not international institutions) as the basis of global order

The blunt language attracted a lot of attention. Conservatives (including many who don’t support Trump) were positive. Liberals cringed, longing for Obama’s soft tone, soft policies, and strategic patient.

He called the nuclear deal with Iran “an embarrassment” and “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the US has ever entered into.” He spoke of Iran’s aggressive support of terror and expansion in the Middle East. He specifically spoke about the threat from “Radical Islamic Terror,” words his predecessor never used (and that Trump himself has used less often in recent months).

He said nothing about “democracy promotion,” a centerpiece of George W. Bush’s foreign policy.

His comment on Venezuela was equally blunt, saying they had turned a rich country into an impoverished failure and done so not because it misapplied socialist policies but because it applied them exactly as they were intended.

Without using the term “axis of evil,” his speech clearly echoed those themes from Pres. Bush’s War on Terror.

As someone said on Twitter, never before has been there so much murmuring of “holy sh**” in so many different languages.

◆ Two natural disasters:

Cat 5 Hurricane Maria hits Puerto Rico with 175 mph winds, the second major hurricane within a month

Mexico suffers a 7.1 magnitude quake.

Numerous casualties and fatalities from both, unfortunately.

Comment: The best way to keep up with news about each is with your favorite breaking-news site online. The cable channels will show you the gritty aftermath but take hours to give you the hard news you can get in a few minutes reading.

Senate Republicans, abandoning a key fiscal doctrine, agreed on Tuesday to move forward on a budget that would add to the federal deficit in order to pave the way for a $1.5 trillion tax cut over the next 10 years.

The Republican lawmakers, under mounting pressure to score a legislative win on taxes, say a tax cut of this magnitude will stimulate economic growth enough to offset any deficit impact.

Yet critics say a deficit-financed tax cut is at odds with longstanding Republican calls for fiscal discipline, including that tax cuts not add to the ballooning federal deficit.

Comment: Tax bills must originate in the House, which is dribbling out some information but not the key details. Those should come in the next week or so.

He and his gang of corrupt officers were tripped up in 2001 when they tried one ripoff while the dealer happened to be on the phone with his girlfriend. She mistakenly thought another drug dealer was the robber and called the cops. Honest cops showed up, saw what was happening, and that was the beginning of the end.

◆Turkey increasingly uses its thuggish, dictatorial tactics in Western democracies. It did it again this week

They did it in May, 2017, when Turkish security officers assaulted peaceful demonstrators in Washington, DC. (New York Times report here.)

This week, they tried to stop a speaker at a conference in Philadelphia. The event was hosted by the Middle East Forum (MEF) for the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, known as NATO-PA.

NATO PA organizers asked that MEF remove a speaker, Emre Çelik, from the program in response to a demand issued by the office of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. MEF removed the speaker from the program, but invited him to address the gathering anyway.

When Çelik rose to speak, the Turkish delegation grew visibly agitated and acted quickly to shut down the event. –Middle East Forum

Daniel Pipes, who heads the Middle East Forum, spoke plainly about the incident, which was captured on video:

President Erdoğan’s attempt to stifle free speech at a Middle East Forum event today was despicable. We did not accept it. –Daniel Pipes

“If true, it is a felony to reveal the existence of a FISA warrant, regardless of the fact that no charges ever emerged,” [Manafort’s spokesman said].

“The U.S. Department of Justice’s Inspector General should immediately conduct an investigation into these leaks and to examine the motivations behind a previous administration’s effort to surveil a political opponent,” he said.

The special counsel’s office and the FBI both declined to comment on Maloni’s statement. They also did not comment on CNN’s original report about surveillance of Manafort. –Reuters

Comment: There are several disturbing aspects of this story, all requiring serious investigation. Manafort’s role is obviously one. So is the apparent release of secret information, the presence of a government wiretap on the manager of a political campaign, the possibility President Trump was picked up on the surveillance, and the statements by several Obama administration intelligence officials that they knew of no such surveillance. It is unclear if those officials made false statements under oath.

The story was broken by CNN: Exclusive: US government wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman, starting in 2014 and continuing, off an on, until this year. The tap, authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), would include periods when he was known to speak with Donald Trump. (Manafort also owned an apartment in Trump Tower; that might be relevant because Trump spoke of wiretaps in Trump Tower.)

There is increasingly strong public speculation that Manafort will be indicted by Robert Mueller’s office.

At this point, we do not know who the FISA warrant(s) targeted.

Comment: At this point, we simply don’t know enough about this surveillance. (In fact, the information released to CNN was almost certainly a felony violation of secret proceedings.)

Anti-Trump people think the fact that a federal judge would authorize surveillance on such a senior figure in the Trump campaign suggests something very bad was afoot and that collaboration with the Russians may have been Manafort’s aim (if not necessarily that of others in the campaign).

Pro-Trump people think this information vindicates his repeated claims that he was wiretapped.

And, of course, a lot of people, myself included, want to know more before they reach a conclusion.

I think a lot of people will agree with Dan Drezner (a centrist and no friend of Trump’s):

Comment: Trump’s speech was an unusually blunt, full-throated defense of America’s interests, as opposed to globalism, and included particularly sharp and detailed attacks on Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela.

Critical responses to the speech line up as expected.

◆More censorship calls on campus, this time because a professor wrote a scholarly article called “The Case for Colonialism”

The article, by Prof. Bruce Gilley of Portland State, was published in a peer-reviewed journal that is very anti-colonial, which presumably thought the piece was serious, well-researched, and would spark scholarly debate. The basic argument does not deny the evils of colonialism but says they must be balanced against the benefits and that anti-colonialism has itself carried high costs.

Recently, Gilley publicly resigned from the American Political Science Association for its ideological bias.

Comment: Given the political climate on today’s campuses, especially those on the coasts, what Gilley’s article sparked was not discussion but calls for him to be fired, censured, and tarred-and-feathered.

Comment: World leaders use the gathering for break-out meetings, one on one. There are several dangerous issues on the agenda, beginning with North Korea, but also including Iran, Russia, and, as the fighting in Syria ebbs, the return of many battle-hardened Islamic fighters to Europe.

The arrests are part of a major manhunt for the perpetrators of Friday’s attack. Police had previously arrested an 18-year-old suspect in the departure area of the port of Dover on Saturday. Dover is major port town about 80 miles southeast of London. –CNN

Comment: One particularly sad part of this attack is that some of the suspects are Syrian refugees who were taken in by a well-meaning elderly couple in the London area, a couple honored by Queen for their humanitarian work. Their kindness appears to have been repaid by a vicious attack on the country that welcomed them.

The protest became violent when demonstrators blocked roads and resisted efforts to disperse them by riot police, mounted officers and water cannon.

“Eight rioters who used violence against police were arrested,” a police statement said in Hebrew. –Daily Mail

Basic background: The ultra-orthodox were originally a tiny fraction of the Israeli population and were given a special exemption from serving in the military (so they could study full-time). That exemption became increasingly controversial as the percentage of ultra-orthodox increased, mainly because of their higher birthrate.

The Trump administration has already reversed crucial pieces of what President Trump has called a “terrible and misguided deal” with Cuba that was struck during the Obama administration, but closing the embassy would be the most dramatic action yet to return the relationship to its Cold War deep freeze. –New York Times

◆ Let us now praise a great baseball record: Cleveland Indians win 22 straight games

How hard is that? Well, one indication is that no one has ever done it before.

Another is to look at the law of averages.

If you are playing .600 ball (as the Indians are, roughly), then the chances you don’t lose any game out of 5 are a little less than 8% (1 in 12).

The chances you don’t lose any game out of 10 are .006 (about 1/2 of 1%)

The chances that, as a ,600 ball club, you don’t lose 1 game out of 22 are .000013 (that’s 4 zeroes, or 1 chance in 100,000).

That number turns out to be remarkably close to what the law of averages suggest.

In 140 years of major league ball, there have been about 210k games. Roughly half the teams are above .500, and maybe 30% are above .600. That would mean .600 ball clubs played about 70,000 major league games. And this is the first team to go 22 straight, not far off from 1 in 100,000.

Comment: Does someone want to check my calculations here and make sure I have it right?

It was the longest demonstrated flight test of a ballistic missile ever conducted by North Korea and the second instance of the country overflying Japan with a system designed to deliver nuclear warheads. …

According to data released by the South Korean military, the missile flew to a range of approximately 3,700 kilometers while reaching an apogee of 770 kilometers over a flight time of 17 minutes. Japan warned civilians on Hokkaido of a missile overflight, activating sirens and issuing electronic alerts. –Japan Times

Comment: The Trump Administration will almost certainly respond with more sanctions and perhaps begin shooting down North Korean missiles or firing missiles over North Korea, just as it has fired them over Japan.

Since both China and Russia voted for the latest round of UN sanctions, this test has to be a finger aimed at them, too.

Rep. Ellison (D-MN) is the #2 person in the Democratic National Committee.

His press secretary, Isaiah Breen, said that a prominent Jewish reporter looks like “an anti-Semitic caricature” and then doubled down on his vile language. He was not fired, at least not yet; he merely joked about it. (That is an update, thanks to a question from Zakary Taylor and some followup.)

The flack later said he had not been fired because of his noxious Tweets.

Comment: The problem goes beyond Ellison and Breen. It has become pervasive on the far left.

Noah R. Wagner ’18, a member of the Harvard Trans Task Force, speaking in a personal capacity, praised the IOP for appointing Manning.

“Whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning are exactly the people that we need, shedding light on the atrocities and injustices for which the U.S. military is responsible, and for which there is rarely transparency or accountability. She’s also a personal hero of mine and a hero for many members of the trans community,” Wagner said. –Harvard Crimson

Comment: Manning, then known as Private Bradley Manning, was court martialed and convicted under the Espionage Act for leaking 750k sensitive or classified documents to Wikileaks. She changed gender identities in prison, where she served 7 years before Pres. Obama commuted her sentence.

Fired FBI Director James Comey drafted a statement to announce the conclusion in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server before the FBI interviewed key witnesses, including Hillary Clinton herself, top Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee claim.

Committee chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, reached that conclusion from transcripts of interviews with people close to Comey and provided by the Department of Justice’s Office of Special Counsel (OSC). Those transcripts, the Republicans said in a Thursday letter to current FBI Director Chris Wray, show Comey had already drafted a conclusion for his investigation before interviewing 17 key witnesses, including Clinton, and before the DOJ had reached immunity agreements with former Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson. CBS News

McClatchy’s bureau in Washington, D.C., was reporting Thursday that President Donald Trump is expected to announce and end to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an Obama-era program that had temporarily deferred deportation of undocumented immigrants who entered the United States as children. –Austin Statesman

Attorneys General from several states were suing to end the program as an unconstitutional overreach of Pres. Obama’s authority, something Obama himself acknowledged before actually doing it. The AGs’ suit says DACA

confers eligibility for work authorization and lawful presence without any statutory authorization from Congress –quoted in Austin Statesman

Comment: The details of Trump’s policy are crucial, and we simply won’t know them until the White House issues its decision.

Here is what is most likely.

First, ending the program will mean stopping coverage for any new arrivals. They will simply be illegal immigrants (or undocumented, if you prefer), regardless of age.

Second, mass deportations of current DACA beneficiaries won’t happen.

Third, what is uncertain is whether DACA permissions to stay will renewed for current “dreamers.” Most likely, they will not. If so, then those people will lose DACA status at some future date. They will then be subject to deportation on a case-by-case basis, just as other illegal immigrants are.

Fourth, the status of Dreamers already in the US could be one of Trump’s bargaining chips in future negotiations about immigration reform and the wall.

would allow automakers to obtain exemptions to deploy up to 25,000 vehicles without meeting existing auto safety standards in the first year, a cap that would rise to 100,000 vehicles annually over three years.–Reuters

Comment: The coming changes in transportation will be enormous, the biggest since the introduction of cars.

Take public transportation, for instance, where about three-quarters of the costs are wages, much of it for drivers (some for mechanics, who will still be needed). The cost of bus drivers is why the vehicles are large; you need fewer drivers that way. If driver wages are eliminated, the buses can be smaller and arrive more frequently. They can also serve less traveled routes.

Ultimately, the biggest question is whether lots of drivers will switch out of car ownership and take self-driving Ubers in urban areas.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

Hat tip to Clarice Feldmanfor the text of the Grassley-Graham memo and to Tom Elia for highlighting this latest Comey contretemps.

A number of the state’s biggest cities, including Houston, Austin, San Antonio and Dallas, all of which are run by Democrats, joined a lawsuit against Texas seeking to strike down the law, which was passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature and signed by the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, in May.

In his ruling issued Wednesday evening, the judge, Orlando L. Garcia of United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, granted a preliminary injunction preventing the law from taking effect while the suit continues.

Judge Garcia appeared to block three provisions of the law, including one that stated that local government entities and officials may not “adopt, enforce or endorse” any policy limiting the enforcement of immigration laws. –New York Times

Comment: The case will move to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in NOLA, one of the most conservative.

The word “endorse” might well be a constitutional problem since it seems to block the First Amendment freedoms of local officials.

He reiterated his pledge to slash corporate tax rates and simplify individual taxes.

Comment: It’s important to remember that overhauling the tax code is much more difficult and complex than simply cutting taxes. Every one of those “loopholes” is there because a special interest lobbied for it and a Congressman pushed it through. They will not want to see those benefits erased. But erasing them is the only way to reform the overall code. That’s why it hasn’t been accomplished since Reagan.

When the United States chose to let Syria slide into chaos while simultaneously seeking to end the isolation of Iran with a nuclear deal, President Barack Obama thought he was avoiding trouble and giving Iran a chance to “get right with the world.”

But it turns out those blunders are still paying dividends for Iran, creating new dangers in the Middle East and threatening the hopes of the Trump administration. That was made clear this week when Yehya al-Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, announced in Gaza that the terror group had reconciled with Iran. –Jonathan Tobin, NY Post

Comment: That’s formulaic. But after Trump’s prior warnings and Sec. of State Tillerson’s open hand were slapped down, the US and Japan will want to act decisively in ways the North Korean regime will feel, and China will notice, but still short of war.

Thirteen people were arrested, and five were injured after more than 100 black-clad, hooded protesters with masks and weapons attacked conservative demonstrators in Berkeley. They allegedly were associated with the far-left Antifa. –Fox News

Comment: Antifa is a violent, noxious movement. The failure of Democrats to condemn it says they prefer political allies, even violent ones, over the First Amendment. Shameful.

The WSJ treats it as a business story (Gilead Sciences buys Kite Pharma), but the news for most people is why Kite is so valuable.

Kite’s main treatment, which is up for regulatory approval in the U.S. and Europe, could drastically improve treatment of patients with some of the most advanced cases of cancer.

“This technology is really going to be transformative to the field,” Gilead CEO John Milligan said in an interview.

The new breed of treatments, known as CAR-T—or chimeric antigen receptor T-cell—therapy, work by extracting a cancer patient’s T-cells, a type of immune cell. The T-cells are then genetically modified outside the body to make them more effective at hunting down and killing tumors, and then re-injected into the patient.

Several other companies also are developing CAR-T treatments—including Switzerland’s Novartis AG , which already won a key regulatory nod in the U.S. earlier this year, and is expected very soon to get the first official green light to start offering the treatment. –Wall Street Journal